TW is not keen on Hemingway in spaaaace
Niven/Pournelle/Barnes: The Legacy of Heorot
This is very much a not-for-me book, and it could simply not be written brilliantly enough for me to appreciate the core of the book.
The writer of a book is entirely free to construct their world to contain certain truths. In the real world, we might dispute it - different people might dispute 'how the world really is' even when they're living in the same community, the same house, and thus have a lot of overlapping experiences, but in a novel, the writer is _entirely_ free to 'make it so'.
If the writer insists that all conform to *and the whole book is full of evidence that this is so* then the only thing you can do as a reader is to walk away. And tell other people why you'd never buy a book from them again.
This book stops well short of openly hateful -isms, but that does not mean that I did not find it deeply distasteful, because there comes a point where something ceases to be 'a fictional characer's opinion' and becomes 'the way the writer(s) portray the fictional world as it is' which in turn always has overtones of 'the way things are/should be/ought to be in the real world.'
My time is too precious to give shelf- and thoughtspace to attitudes I loathe.
The story is about a colony in space. The main protagonist is a paranoid soldier who keeps telling people they ought to expect trouble. He gets the trouble he predicted - an alien animal which wreaks havoc on the colony, and nobody but him was mentally prepared for the possibility, so he's proven to have been right all along. Then begins the long, bloody, and I'll assume successful battle, presumably led by him, with the alien and/or the alien's mates. (Will I read enough of the book to find out which it is? Will I hell.)
It's a very simple plot, and even without the cover copy giving most of it away, I would have known the shape of the story on page three or four: the vigilant soldier prepares for a fight when lesser men mock him, which means there will be an enemy worthy of him, and that he shall triumph in the end and get the recognition and the woman that he craves.
I find nothing likeable about the protag. The book does not go into namby-pamby things like emotions, much less doubts - and what I see from the outside is a man I would give a very wide berth to. Not because he is a soldier; because he is a big game hunter who seems to see little difference in the two. He shows some pity towards those who are weaker than him (women, people brain-damaged by cryosleep, people too stupid to see that he's right), but seems completely incapable of dealing with other humans as equals.
Because this is the author's world, what I saw as irrational behaviour (at one point the protag is injured and in hospital and refuses to even put down his gun, to the point of threatening others) is vindicated as a sensible precaution, which is the last point where I would have put down this book if I hadn't hated it already. (I can be stubborn this way, I wanted to know what about the writing [as opposed to the ideas] was causing me to hate it so.)
The language itself is competent. It did not show up on my awkwardness radar. It's nothing to write home about either, but in itself it is readable. The following excerpt might give you a flavour, however:
[Examining the remains of a dead animal]
With the gleaming tip of a scalpel, Marnie drew a line down the middle of the dead Joe's pink, furred belly, then gingerly peeled away a layer of skin to inspect a fatty layer beneath.
Sylvia sat on a stool with her knees pulled up flush with her swollen stomach. She looked like a pregnant elf perched on a mushroom.
(Oh yes, it's a colony. Women are supposed to breed, and happy to breed and make more new colonists. The whole book is very much steeped in frontier myths: the man provides and protects with his gun, the women stay at home to be threatened/admire/be pregnant and raise children. Add in the constant assessment of the quality of people's genes, and you have a very skeevy scenario.)
Need more? (The protag appears to have moved out of the main camp so he can hunt better; because of course he's invincible.)
"How is Mary Ann?"
"Knocked righteously up. You did a good job there. Three weeks pregnant, and she's healthy as a horse, and I'll be it's a boy."
"What do you mean, 'you bet'? Isnt' there a test or something?"
[it follows a conversation about a daughter he had never met-
I was only about eighteen. Elva was twenty-four and wante dthe kid. Wanted to have it by herself. Picked me. Said that she thought I would probably make pretty good basic daddy material."
"I'd say she was right."
"I only kneow she had it, Sylvia. And on the little girl's third birthday, Elva sent me a holo. That was it - she didn't want to be botherd with a husband."
"Would you have married her?"
"I suppose so. And resented the hell out of her."
From where I'm sitting, this Elva slept with someone, realised he was pretty toxic to be around, and got the hell out while she still could, and I can only say good on her and I hope she's happy. Which is, of course, not what the writers want me to buy into, but honestly, can you read the following passage and root for him?
"I was shocked at how hard it hit me. The thought that Mary Ann is the mother of my child. It doesn't mattter how much or how little I love her. What matters is that she's going to be the mother of my child."
Two seconds later, he predictably declares that he loves (pregnant by and married to his arch-enemy) Sylvia, who also loves him but can't, since she chose another.
This is a moral code that strikes me as not just old-fashioned, but pretty disgusting. Of all the ways to design a future, why would the authors design it like this? Is it plausible that the whole colony - should have adopted these values? Given that they all seem to come from a very small subset of planet Earth - mostly White Americans, with a couple of Europeans, one black man, and one American of Mexican descent - and that the society they build seems to be mostly modelled on the American West, to the point where actual described geography is completely ignored in the construction of the colony - we have long left the realm of realism and entered fantasyland.
Only, as writers of actual fantasy novels point out, fiction is supposed to make sense, and this one doesn't.
The intense focus on action with no nuances of chracter development and complete lack of relationships between equals would have turned me off this book anyway - I'm really not interested to observe an escalation of hostilities, scattered big explosions, and a handful of survivors at the end. I might have wanted to read a book where colonists settle, find that the survey had missed out [danger] (this used to be *such* a clicheed plot in SF, what happened to it?) and who now need to McGyver solutions. There's _a lot_ of mileage left in this one, I feel, because each planet, each colony, and each threat is different, but a threat that only exists so a lone soldier can successfully blast it with his gun?
As I said, you can sum this up as Hemingway in Space, and I wasn't particularly keen on this type of story first time around, but at least Hemingway is authentic and has a certain facility with language, and for all the dislike I have for the way of life Hemingway glorifies, he had been living it, so I guess to him it was real, and he was a product of his time. For people in the 1980s to still be hankering for a world in which soldiers are given the respect they are due and shooting large animals is a manful pasttime, and women exist to give men the (good-looking, healthy, equipped with good genes) babies they deserve, is-
Ah well. You can probably fill in the blank yourself.
This entry was also posted at http://beyond-elechan.dreamwidth.org/21472.html Reply wherever you want. This post at DW has
comments.
This is very much a not-for-me book, and it could simply not be written brilliantly enough for me to appreciate the core of the book.
The writer of a book is entirely free to construct their world to contain certain truths. In the real world, we might dispute it - different people might dispute 'how the world really is' even when they're living in the same community, the same house, and thus have a lot of overlapping experiences, but in a novel, the writer is _entirely_ free to 'make it so'.
If the writer insists that all conform to *and the whole book is full of evidence that this is so* then the only thing you can do as a reader is to walk away. And tell other people why you'd never buy a book from them again.
This book stops well short of openly hateful -isms, but that does not mean that I did not find it deeply distasteful, because there comes a point where something ceases to be 'a fictional characer's opinion' and becomes 'the way the writer(s) portray the fictional world as it is' which in turn always has overtones of 'the way things are/should be/ought to be in the real world.'
My time is too precious to give shelf- and thoughtspace to attitudes I loathe.
The story is about a colony in space. The main protagonist is a paranoid soldier who keeps telling people they ought to expect trouble. He gets the trouble he predicted - an alien animal which wreaks havoc on the colony, and nobody but him was mentally prepared for the possibility, so he's proven to have been right all along. Then begins the long, bloody, and I'll assume successful battle, presumably led by him, with the alien and/or the alien's mates. (Will I read enough of the book to find out which it is? Will I hell.)
It's a very simple plot, and even without the cover copy giving most of it away, I would have known the shape of the story on page three or four: the vigilant soldier prepares for a fight when lesser men mock him, which means there will be an enemy worthy of him, and that he shall triumph in the end and get the recognition and the woman that he craves.
I find nothing likeable about the protag. The book does not go into namby-pamby things like emotions, much less doubts - and what I see from the outside is a man I would give a very wide berth to. Not because he is a soldier; because he is a big game hunter who seems to see little difference in the two. He shows some pity towards those who are weaker than him (women, people brain-damaged by cryosleep, people too stupid to see that he's right), but seems completely incapable of dealing with other humans as equals.
Because this is the author's world, what I saw as irrational behaviour (at one point the protag is injured and in hospital and refuses to even put down his gun, to the point of threatening others) is vindicated as a sensible precaution, which is the last point where I would have put down this book if I hadn't hated it already. (I can be stubborn this way, I wanted to know what about the writing [as opposed to the ideas] was causing me to hate it so.)
The language itself is competent. It did not show up on my awkwardness radar. It's nothing to write home about either, but in itself it is readable. The following excerpt might give you a flavour, however:
[Examining the remains of a dead animal]
With the gleaming tip of a scalpel, Marnie drew a line down the middle of the dead Joe's pink, furred belly, then gingerly peeled away a layer of skin to inspect a fatty layer beneath.
Sylvia sat on a stool with her knees pulled up flush with her swollen stomach. She looked like a pregnant elf perched on a mushroom.
(Oh yes, it's a colony. Women are supposed to breed, and happy to breed and make more new colonists. The whole book is very much steeped in frontier myths: the man provides and protects with his gun, the women stay at home to be threatened/admire/be pregnant and raise children. Add in the constant assessment of the quality of people's genes, and you have a very skeevy scenario.)
Need more? (The protag appears to have moved out of the main camp so he can hunt better; because of course he's invincible.)
"How is Mary Ann?"
"Knocked righteously up. You did a good job there. Three weeks pregnant, and she's healthy as a horse, and I'll be it's a boy."
"What do you mean, 'you bet'? Isnt' there a test or something?"
[it follows a conversation about a daughter he had never met-
I was only about eighteen. Elva was twenty-four and wante dthe kid. Wanted to have it by herself. Picked me. Said that she thought I would probably make pretty good basic daddy material."
"I'd say she was right."
"I only kneow she had it, Sylvia. And on the little girl's third birthday, Elva sent me a holo. That was it - she didn't want to be botherd with a husband."
"Would you have married her?"
"I suppose so. And resented the hell out of her."
From where I'm sitting, this Elva slept with someone, realised he was pretty toxic to be around, and got the hell out while she still could, and I can only say good on her and I hope she's happy. Which is, of course, not what the writers want me to buy into, but honestly, can you read the following passage and root for him?
"I was shocked at how hard it hit me. The thought that Mary Ann is the mother of my child. It doesn't mattter how much or how little I love her. What matters is that she's going to be the mother of my child."
Two seconds later, he predictably declares that he loves (pregnant by and married to his arch-enemy) Sylvia, who also loves him but can't, since she chose another.
This is a moral code that strikes me as not just old-fashioned, but pretty disgusting. Of all the ways to design a future, why would the authors design it like this? Is it plausible that the whole colony - should have adopted these values? Given that they all seem to come from a very small subset of planet Earth - mostly White Americans, with a couple of Europeans, one black man, and one American of Mexican descent - and that the society they build seems to be mostly modelled on the American West, to the point where actual described geography is completely ignored in the construction of the colony - we have long left the realm of realism and entered fantasyland.
Only, as writers of actual fantasy novels point out, fiction is supposed to make sense, and this one doesn't.
The intense focus on action with no nuances of chracter development and complete lack of relationships between equals would have turned me off this book anyway - I'm really not interested to observe an escalation of hostilities, scattered big explosions, and a handful of survivors at the end. I might have wanted to read a book where colonists settle, find that the survey had missed out [danger] (this used to be *such* a clicheed plot in SF, what happened to it?) and who now need to McGyver solutions. There's _a lot_ of mileage left in this one, I feel, because each planet, each colony, and each threat is different, but a threat that only exists so a lone soldier can successfully blast it with his gun?
As I said, you can sum this up as Hemingway in Space, and I wasn't particularly keen on this type of story first time around, but at least Hemingway is authentic and has a certain facility with language, and for all the dislike I have for the way of life Hemingway glorifies, he had been living it, so I guess to him it was real, and he was a product of his time. For people in the 1980s to still be hankering for a world in which soldiers are given the respect they are due and shooting large animals is a manful pasttime, and women exist to give men the (good-looking, healthy, equipped with good genes) babies they deserve, is-
Ah well. You can probably fill in the blank yourself.
This entry was also posted at http://beyond-elechan.dreamwidth.org/21472.html Reply wherever you want. This post at DW has
comments.